1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to conferencing and more specifically to efficiently increasing the number of conference calls associated with a specific phone number.
2. Introduction
Businesses and individuals use conference calls daily to meet with remote parties. Conference calls allow individuals from geographically separated locations to communicate and interact as a group. Conference calls can be used to conduct meetings, presentations, classes, and otherwise to communicate with, or disseminate information to, a group of participants. In addition, conference calls are increasingly being used for entertainment or social purposes. Moreover, conference calls are generally viewed as an excellent means of cutting traveling costs, increasing productivity, and overcoming previously formidable barriers of distance and geography. Not surprisingly, conference calls have swiftly grown in use and popularity, resulting in large increases in demand.
A widely used approach of conference calling is the centralized server conferencing model. Here, a server acts as a user agent and is implemented on a certain device on a network. The server receives the media streams from all participants, mixes them and redistributes the appropriate media stream back to the participants. This approach has many important advantages. First, the centralized state of conference is easy to manage and control. This is extremely important given the complexity and variety of conferencing applications. Second, the centralized server conferencing model supports a broad variety of clients, as no special demands on bandwidth or processing are required from the clients. Another model used is the end system mixing model, which shifts the management to a specific device. This model is more suitable for small scale conferences of three or four participants. Other approaches use multicast or full mesh topologies for conferencing; these are limited by the range of clients supported in a conference.
Nevertheless, the increasing demand for conferencing has exposed several limitations in the current conferencing models. For example, to join a conference call, an individual typically must dial a telephone number associated with the conference call. Often, an individual must dial a different telephone number when he or she wants to add a different participant or join a different conference call. Both the individual and the group must have the proper telephone number to join, which can be a difficult and daunting task as the range of telephone numbers grows. A previous solution has been to host multiple conferences on a single device that can be accessed by a specific phone number. Here, a single phone number may be used to access multiple conferences: the user simply calls the device at the specific phone number and enters a conference code that identifies a specific conference. However, this solution is limited by the device's hosting capacity—once the device's hosting capacity is reached, a new device must be implemented, requiring a different phone number. As the demand for conferencing grows, more devices need to be installed, requiring even more phone numbers. What is needed is needed in the art is a flexible, efficient, and scalable way to increase the number of conference calls associated with a specific phone number.